Imagine if you lived in a world in which there was a single metric that defined the "truth" about the "good quality" of a car. Imagine if the career progression of car designers depended on how well they scored on this miraculous metric. It is hard to picture exactly what mode of transport we would all be using but it would, without doubt, be a worse world to live in.

This is not an attack on Which? or What Car? that regularly line up cars on various league tables of quality. They are very useful publications. It is an illustration of what was probably the most absurd part of Jeremy Hunt's statement in response to the Francis report on Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust.

He promised us that "in the future the chief inspector will ensure that there is a single version of the truth about how their hospitals are performing, not just on finance and targets, but on a single assessment that fully reflects what matters to patients".

In itself, having a single official assessment of how well hospitals are performing is a perfectly sensible idea and should be welcomed. Indeed, most of what Hunt proposed was welcome and should, if executed effectively, go a long way to addressing the problems that occurred in Mid Staffordshire

But there was a problem in the way he presented this particular aspect of his plans – one that risks repeating the failures of the past, one that reeks of the old NHS culture: the culture that led to the tragedies at Mid Staffordshire.

A single assessment can be a useful tool. But not if you begin to believe it is the "truth" about quality or that you have made "an assessment that fully reflects what matters to patients". After all, there are roughly 50 million NHS patients in England, ranging from infants to old people with dementia. You might be able to fully reflect what matters to some of them; or partially reflect what matters to all of them. But, as Abraham Lincoln would have said, had he worked in the NHS, you are never going to assess all of what matters to all of them.

Hunt has identified quite rightly that we need more expert inspectors, more detailed information on quality, and regulators that exercise real judgments about where care is being provided to a good standard. But if quality in healthcare is not to be reduced once again to a tick-box exercise, we must avoid a world in which large central government agencies are tasked with identifying the "single version of the truth" when it comes to quality in healthcare.

In Hunt's statement, most of the proposed changes related to increasing accountability upwards to regulators and government. Relatively few – such as the duty of candour – related to accountability directly to patients. This is pragmatic, in that it will have the biggest immediate effect. But it ignores the essential longer-term goal of increasing accountability directly to patients.

Francis had some good ideas on how to achieve this. Unfortunately, they appear rather late in the report. That may be why they seem to have been ignored. It is a shame because they point towards a much more radical rebalancing of power and accountability in healthcare.

Recommendation 244 says: "Patients need to be granted user-friendly, real-time and retrospective access to read their records, and a facility to enter comments. They should be enabled to have a copy of records in a form usable by them, if they wish to have one." And: "Systems should be designed to include prompts and defaults where these will contribute to safe and effective care, and to accurate recording of information on first entry."

I want an NHS in which information about the standards of care I receive come to me first and regulators second. Currently we are building an NHS that does this the other way round. This needs to be reversed.